Dracula Untold Blu-ray ReviewMar 03 2015 01:15 AMDracula Untold games its thrones on Blu-ray with an edition that presents this leaden reboot of the Dracula franchise in solid high definition, with an army... Read More

as i have promised in the LOA thread, i was working on a comprehensive guide about demystifying 'Edge Enhancement'. The first incarnation is just finished, so it might still be a little rough, but here we go:Ultimate Guide to Edge Enhancement

What a fantastic article. I explains something I've never really been able to put my finger on - why tiles such as Blade, SPR and Pitch Black look so damn fine! I've compared R1 NTSC and R2 PAL discs in the past and generally prefered the R1s. The phrases I've used are that for whatever reason the R2s look "like TV" and the R1s look more like film. Maybe I just picked good R1 examples...
Mark

Excellent! Bjoern, may I submit a link to your page to the http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=102821 "Cinema is simply letting the audience fill in the blanks." - David Lean.
pic courtesy of Steve Matto

Excellent, excellent work.
This should be required reading material.
I only wish you included the Diva scene from 'The Fifth Element'. I have always found the EE on that scene to be very distracting. I have never understood why so many use it for demo purposes.
It's time to put a stop to this 'edge enhancement' nonsense once and for all. Your efforts are appreciated.
Frank

All presentations should be in the original theatrical aspect ratio and the viewer should have a zoom button if he must have his screen filled.

Perhaps next time you could include a few shots from the dismal transfer of Fox's recent 5-star THX-approved DVD of The Sound of Music...

[quote]SoM is a title that really varies wildly by scene. The opening number looks severely "enhanced" (Check out the low angle shot of Julie Andrews with the blue sky background towards the end of that sequence for a good EE "snapshot"), but other parts of the disc look much better ("The Lonely Goatherd", for example).

Kudos on making a great article. I always knew what edge enhancement meant (from computer graphic design), but I could never figure out why studios bother with it? I mean, they've proven they can make great looking movies (Insider, Titanic, etc) so why bother?
I have a question...in the article it mentions that a low pass filter is used to eliminate flickering. I dont understand how there could be flickering.
I mean, if youre watching an NTSC movie at 29.997 frames per second, then theres only going to be as much flicker as the video signal allows, how can a video signal have more or less flicker?

Great job, Bjoern. A good understanding of edge enhancement has eluded me until now and I really appreciate it.

At work, when I take a project and do a good job they always ask me to expand it, so...

Perhaps you could expand it into a guide to DVD reviewer terms. You could explain and show examples of black level, shadow detail, the benefits of anamorphic enhancement, etc. Then perhaps Parker could link it to the software page like Jeffrey Forner's excellent widescreen/pan & scan explanation on the Movies page.

Thanks for the excellent guide, Bjoern! It certainly helps raise consciouness and understanding about the issue. I remember very clearly watching the Diva scene from Fifth Element back in 1998 on a Runco projector, and thinking to myself "what's the cause of that halo to the right of her image?". Now I know.
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Nicely done.
When doing Web pages, I generally have to resize images a lot, and then have to slather on a generous helping of EE to compensate for the degradation caused by resizing. Still, at typical computer screen resolutions (and the size and relative importance of the images), it's rarely a big deal.
Similarly, EE isn't that big a deal on smaller screens, but blowing up the image to projection size really makes things obvious. Thanks for clearly illustrating this.
Ryan